by Tom Vitale
There were some close calls, like the time in Cambodia when we met a rickshaw driver who hooked us up with pot. In order to prevent getting stoned and accidentally smuggling drugs across an international border, a weed-loving DP who shall remain nameless made sure to always keep our stash in the same pocket of his camera bag. After landing at JFK, while we were waiting at the carousel for our luggage, a beagle wearing a Customs and Border Protection uniform complete with badge beelined straight to our pile of luggage, including the pot camera bag. Oh fuck, had we forgot to flush what was left of the drugs? Everyone slowly backed away, leaving our producer, Marcy, who hadn’t been aware of the business dealings with the rickshaw driver. The CBP beagle’s handler was an avuncular looking customs officer who, seeing the Pollyannaish look on Marcy’s face, must have mentally ruled out drug smuggling, money laundering, and terrorism, because he asked, “Young lady, do you have any food in your suitcase?” Marcy regularly brought home all sorts of goodies, everything from a smoked reindeer leg to peculiarly flavored novelty potato chips. Travel professional that she was, Marcy put on her best smile, batted her eyelashes, and said, “Good evening, officer, what a cute doggy you have. Umm… food? No, I don’t think I have any food.” Ignoring his beagle, who was all over our luggage, the customs officer instead watched Marcy sheepishly open her personal suitcase. I’d been slowly edging back toward our gear and craned my neck to see what Marcy had been smuggling this time. The inside of her bag looked like a convenience store. There was a stash of Kampot peppers, several bags of nuts from a street vendor, as well as a tattered two-liter soda bottle refilled with local moonshine.
With an apologetic smile, the customs officer confiscated the contraband and gave Marcy a gentle warning. “Now, miss, next time you really must observe the regulations. Remember they’re for your own safety as well as the safety of others.” Then he left, struggling to gracefully drag his beagle away from the camera bag while Marcy curtseyed and waved goodbye.
I wasn’t so lucky a couple years later. Deep in the Dominican Republic’s interior, my production vehicle got stopped at a checkpoint. I hadn’t realized police in the Caribbean dressed in fatigues and rode around in tanks. I also should have known that the DR was one of those countries where they film Locked Up Abroad. As in being caught with drugs meant the likelihood of some serious jail time as well as a career-ruining scandal. So, when the military police found pot in the camera bag, it didn’t matter that it wasn’t mine. The situation eventually got resolved thanks to a very generous bribe, but not before I was designated collateral and held hostage while the driver took my ATM card and left to withdraw several thousand dollars from my checking account. The next morning, I saw Tony at breakfast. Traumatized and desperate to confess, I told him how the night before I had been led into the jungle and forced to lie facedown in a freshly dug hole. I told him I’d noticed a shovel, desperately trying not to wonder what the hole was for. I continued to explain to the seemingly unimpressed Tony how I’d really gotten scared when the unstable kid with the machine gun started to shake and cry because it was taking so long for the driver to return with the bribe.
Tony finally looked up from his iPad and said, “Getting fleeced in the Caribbean is a rite of passage.” Then he went back to whatever it was he was reading.
“BY THE WAY, I WAS in a cult,” Josh, who was producing the “Crew Special” with me, said when I interviewed him. “No, but honestly, it was very much a cult and I’m not afraid to say that, because that’s kind of what it was. I like to think of it as cutthroat affection.”
“Cutthroat affection” was a poetic way to describe the capricious man who both fought tooth and nail to get me on the Emmy nomination year after year, as well as threatened to attach jumper cables and a car battery to my testicles in Vietnam.
“You’re off the show” might as well have been one of Tony’s catch phrases. Most often he said it as a joke, but the line between a truth and a joke… well, it’s complicated. There was a culture of Wild West mob justice, and with Judge Tony on the bench, let’s just say that was not a courtroom in which you wanted to find yourself.
One of the things that made being a part of the crew perhaps a little dangerous was Tony’s willingness to cut off his nose to spite his face. Punishments for “violations of the code,” as Tony called them, often outweighed the crime. Sometimes, getting fired was getting off too easy. Instead he preferred creative punishments that sent as strong a message to everyone else as they did to the intended target.
Tony once devised a unique strategy for resolving a personnel issue in the editorial department. It was decided one of the four editors who worked on the show was obstructionist and wasn’t pulling his weight. So Tony sent each of the editors an expensive meat basket, with a note thanking them for their work. All of them except the problem editor. Tony knew people talked at the water cooler, and it was only a matter of time until “Did you get the meat basket from Tony?” came up. Let’s just say the message was received loud and clear.
“It was a cult that I would happily join again,” said Nari, a close friend and producer since the No Reservations days. “Like, give me the Kool-Aid. Where’s the Kool-Aid? I’ll drink it. I’ll drink gallons of it. You kind of have to have that mentality. The show was very difficult at times, given certain circumstances, but it is—for all of us, and I can say this without a doubt—the greatest thing we’ve ever done and we will ever do. It was such an honor and privilege just to be near him and to work with him and really become a part of his family. We were family.”
I think we all felt that way. It was one big dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless. We were a group of like-minded people with a shared compulsive need for stimulation and a relentless drive to produce work of ever higher caliber. We got paid to travel all over the world, partaking in an astounding range of experiences, and we got to do it together, year after year. It really was the best job in the world. Sure, making the show was a huge amount of work. Physically, emotionally, psychologically, temporally. It was not fun, by any standard definition. But it never felt like a job; it was a lifestyle, a calling. Best of all, at the center of it was Tony.
AS I CONTINUED CONDUCTING INTERVIEWS for the “Crew Special,” I was surprised to learn that Tony had been far from a monolith. In general, everyone spoke of overarching personality traits, but Tony seemed to have the uncanny ability to adapt himself to whoever he was interacting with. Within maybe five minutes of meeting, he could size someone up and figure out how to make the puppet dance. It was a talent for sure, and perhaps part of how he was able to connect with his single-serving TV friends.
My relationship with him was markedly different from almost everyone I spoke with. Tony seemed to instinctively know how to get the best work—and provoke the most loyalty—out of everyone. For one crew member that might mean showering him with compliments; for another it might mean playing it low-key. For me, it meant a full immersion experience, a combination of adrenaline, stimulation, and fear. I had a front-row seat to join him on an existential psychodrama, where the boundaries between work and play were blurry at best. Where did reality end and television begin? Our relationship with the camera and each other brought out the best and worst in both of us, and at times it could be hard to know which was which.
While I ran around wearing a look of harried intensity Tony’s chef friend Andy Ricker said, “Tom, do you ever get to relax and enjoy yourself? Man, you’re in Thailand!” Tony answered for me, saying, “Andy, shut up. We like him just the way he is.”
Tony’s leadership philosophy, “Only pat the baby when it’s sleeping,” was a calculated approach from his days in the kitchen that meant you were unlikely to hear praise for having done a good job. If he looked happy after a scene I’d worked hard to put together and I made the mistake of asking, “So, how’d that go, Tony?” he’d say something like, “It was fine. Mostly. Nothing to write home about.” The harder he was on me, the more desperate I was for a little bit of p
ositive feedback or approval. Then when Tony said, “You’re like a son to me,” or called me part of the “A-Team,” or at the end of a good shoot when he’d say, “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” I’d feel worse than I had before. Whenever I tried to thank Tony, tell him how much it meant to me, he’d say, “Jesus, Tom, okay, I get it, I get it, you’re happy and all emotional and shit. Enough already. You’re ruining the mood.”
THE LAYOVER PUT OUR RELATIONSHIP to the test. Over the summer of 2011 and 2012—in between regularly scheduled seasons of No Reservations—I was Tony’s constant travel companion for about thirty days straight. A spin-off series for the Travel Channel, The Layover focused on what a traveler could actually do should they find themselves with a twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour layover in a given city. “God, if I was really saddled with a twenty-four-hour layover, the last thing I’d do is leave the airport. I’d sleep!” Tony complained. He hated doing such accessible programming, and dubbed it the twenty-four-hour “fuckover.” He only agreed to do it because the series was basically a scam to burn through the number of episodes contractually owed to the Travel Channel. Here’s how it worked: We’d land in one city to rendezvous with a crew already set up and ready to go, then shoot for about two insanely packed sixteen-plus-hour days before departing for the next location, where the process would start all over again. Each alternating crew in each location stayed on for another week to fill out the rest of the episode after Tony and I departed.
Every episode of The Layover had a producer who knew how all the pieces fit together and who would take their show through the edit. As the series director I was essentially the “Tony handler,” a task that by this time had become my speciality. This isn’t to say the experience wasn’t without its speed bumps. Namely, in the second season, when I may have gone a touch too far by exploiting one of Tony’s phobias for purposes of entertainment. He often referred to a hilarious and crippling fear of mimes, and for the longest time I assumed it was just part of his shtick. Until we went to France.
Tony stood framed in a picture-perfect postcard. Pastel green leaves rustled in the breeze, children laughed, an opulent Beaux Arts fountain murmured, while a mime wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt, carrying a tramp suitcase and umbrella, face covered in greasepaint, emerged from behind a tree. It was Paris, and Tony had just wanted to stroll through the park, which a month before, as we were planning the trip, had sounded boring. “Surprising” him with a mime had seemed like a great idea. But now all I could think about was how much Tony hated mimes and clowns, and if I got caught, there was no predicting what he’d do.
“You know… the first time I came to Paris, my dad brought me to a park just like this,” Tony said. He smiled with a hint of nostalgia watching the children play. “It’s a treasured memory.”
Fuck! Tony was delivering exceedingly rare sentimental content direct to camera! “Kill the mime, kill the mime!” I whispered into the walkie. One of our production assistants grabbed the mime by his suspenders and pulled him behind a bush.
“Okay, let’s hit the road,” Tony said.
Dammit. Typical. Tony had a habit of shutting down when he sensed the camera was set with a good close-up. “Umm, okay, Tony, just stand here for another minute while we back off and get a wide shot,” I said. Then I squeaked into the walkie, praying Tony wouldn’t overhear, “Cue the mime!” I could almost hear the Jaws soundtrack as the mime jauntily tiptoed closer and closer. I was playing with fire; the entire farce required Tony believing the mime was an unlucky chance encounter.
“My father got me a wood boat to sail in the fountain,” Tony said. “I’ve been thinking about him a lot… those were good times.”
“Kill the mime! Kill the mime!” I said. Just in time, our heroic production assistant tackled the striped bogie lurking in the background of the shot. But no sooner were the cameras back on Tony than his inspiration evaporated. “Got your wides? Great, let’s go,” Tony said, without waiting for an answer.
It was now or never. “Cue the mime, now! Now! NOW!” I ordered. The mime leaped out from behind a flower bed and put Tony in an invisible box. Our Paris fixers hadn’t arranged just any old back-alley mime; this mime was Marcel Marceau’s protégé, so the invisible box was inescapable. It was hilarious, and Tony was a good sport, even when his hand became “glued” to the mime and he couldn’t let go. There was no question the interaction was hilarious, and best of all, I appeared to have gotten away with it! My sordid act of television-related treason complete, Tony sat on the edge of the fountain. He had a strange look on his face, and I watched him for a moment before going over. “Everything okay?” I asked.
“Fifty years of coming to Paris,” Tony said, staring right through me. “And I’ve never been mimed.” After a long pause, he turned in my direction, his face drained of color and hand twitching. “I was raped by a clown as a kid,” he said.
The cigarette fell from my hand as Tony silently got up and walked toward his waiting car. Raped by a clown? Tony was fucking with me; he had to be playing the game, right? Somehow he’d figured out the mime was a setup—it was the only logical explanation—and he was fighting fire with fire…
Twenty-three days later Tony and I landed in Philadelphia. It had been a busy summer. Since Paris we’d been to São Paulo, Seattle, Toronto, Dublin, Taipei, New Orleans, and Chicago. Seven cities crisscrossed around the world in just over three weeks, and we were exhausted.
While in Chicago we’d planned to film at a hot dog place, but the restaurant had violated our strict no social media policy by posting on Twitter before we filmed. After double checking with the office to confirm the restaurant was aware of our rules, Tony replied to the tweet saying, “This is how to not end up on television. #SceneCanceled.” The Chicago NBC affiliate picked up on the story; Tony was portrayed as a callous and wealthy celebrity chef picking on humble restaurant owners, who—unfortunately for the optics—also happened to be North Korean refugees struggling to make it in the States. Eventually it was revealed the office had in fact neglected to inform Budacki’s not to tweet, and most damning, Tony had been knowingly lied to.
I had nothing to do with the hot dog cover-up, but Budacki-gate, as it became known, continued to escalate. Soon almost everything Tony said seemed to revolve around themes of trust and betrayal. Meanwhile, I was becoming increasingly paranoid, with the Paris mime incident eating away at me for weeks. “Everyone fucks up,” Tony said. “It’s lying about it I can’t forgive. Heads will roll for this.” Was he talking about Budacki-gate or the mime, or both? I had a terrible sinking suspicion he was giving me every opportunity to admit I was responsible for the mime. But I just couldn’t.
We had dinner at the hotel our last night in Philadelphia, and as was often the case at dinner, Tony ordered a massive bone-in rib eye, medium raw. He didn’t seem to notice when the food arrived; he just sat there with that same thousand-mile stare from Paris. Tracing a finger along the blade of his oversize steak knife, Tony said, “You know, Tom, trust is a funny thing. Very easily given, very easily lost, and almost impossible to earn back.” Fuck. He had to know about the mime. I was far too frightened and confused to think clearly, let alone admit what I had done. Fortunately, The Layover was almost over for the season. Best to let things cool down, I reassured myself.
The next morning I checked to make sure the coast was clear then darted across the hotel lobby. As I lifted my suitcase into a taxi eager to get to 30th Street Station, Tony pulled up in his car and said, “Tom, there you are. Come with me, I’ll give you a ride back to the city.” Shit… Just me and Tony in his car for the next couple of hours. I thought about making a run for it, but I knew he’d catch me. Much of the drive was spent in brooding silence, but all the while my internal monologue was screaming back and forth.
“He knows, he knows, that’s why you’re in the car. Honesty is the best policy, just come clean!… Cool it, I got away with it, he doesn’t know anything… Tony totally knows, he knows
everything!… What if he doesn’t? Don’t be stupid, people are losing their jobs over a freaking hot dog, and I flagrantly used a childhood trauma for purposes of comedy! Don’t! Say! Anything!”
The Meadowlands—that vast, featureless swamp in northern New Jersey where the Sopranos were always doing something sinister—signaled we were nearing New York. This was my last chance. I was pretty sure I was going down one way or the other, so I might as well go down with as much honor as I could salvage. After what I’d done, making it geographically convenient for Tony to dispose of my body was the least I could do.
“Tony, I have something I need to tell you,” I said, getting emotional. If I thought Tony looked upset before, I was unprepared for the intensity that consumed his face as he took his eyes from the road and looked right at me. I swallowed and braced for impact. “In… in Paris… the mime… It was my idea, I arranged it.” It took a moment for Tony’s expression to change. First he went blank, then he started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” I asked hesitantly.
“I thought you were going to tell me something serious!” he said. “This reminds me of my godson. You know, I thought he was just some misanthropic teenager who spent all his time in his room jerking off while playing video games. But turns out the whole time he was actually running a highly sophisticated drug ring selling pot to all the rich kids at school.” Tony paused, waiting for me to catch up. “You know, I really shoooould be mad at the kid, but… honestly, I was sorta proud.”